6.25.2010

For Rivane Neuenschwander’s New Museum exhibition A Day Like Any Other, the Brazilian artist is inviting online and in-person visitors to write down their wishes, which will be printed on ribbons hung on the wall for museum-goers to take. On the installation Eu desejo o seu desejo / I Wish Your Wish (2003):

Visitors are invited to select ribbons printed with a wish to tie around their wrists. When the ribbon falls off, tradition has it that one's wish will be fulfilled. Visitors may write another wish and place it in the empty hole. This work of art is based on a similar practice that takes place at the church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim (Our Lord of the Good End) in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.

Yesterday I linked up a story about how the New York Sanitation Department was planning to get rid of "eyesore" ghostbikes, the white-painted memorials to cyclists killed by cars. Via commenter Tskross comes news that they reneged, after pressure from the families of dead cyclists. The new policy, as reported by the Daily News:

"A memorial bicycle (ghost rider) will only be removed ... if the memorial bicycle meets the derelict bicycle criteria," the department said in a statement Monday. That means if the memorial bike is in bad shape - missing tires, handlebars, or pedals -- it still may be clipped from its post.

So the key is for families and friends to maintain memorial bikes: fair enough. As Tskross says, "score one for decency."

"We love playing foosball here in Italy. We usually play it 2 vs. 2," reads text at the website of Milan's Nike Store. "Well, at Nike Stadium Milan we play it 11 vs. 11." It's the "the largest foosball table on the planet," enthuses the blog Mademan, making the same claim Gizmodo did about a 22-person table Amstel fabricated a few years.

But leave it to advertisers to oversell -- and to think they came up with the idea first.Beating them all to the punch by well over a decade is Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, who in 1991 created a 22-player table, called Stadium. He was tweaking the spectacle of sports, but at times he injected other ideas as well. The photo above shows the table in use by a soccer team Cattelan formed. In the early years of concern over a spike in immigration in Italy, he recruited Senegalese men on the streets of a small town near Bologna and asked them to be on his team, which actually played tournaments ("[M]y guys were always losing. It was bad"). He writes that the team name, emblazoned on the front of uniforms he had made, is a Nazi slogan:

It's a fake company. It's a word that comes from the German. It means "go home." It's the only memory I have from the war because my father and my grandfather were always saying "rauss." And you can still see this word on the streets in Italy — with the " ." So it's a ghost that's still around.

6.24.2010

The women divers of Jeju Island (known as haenyeo) are unique and rare workers. For centuries, they have harvested seaweed and shellfish at depths of 20 meters, holding their breath for as long as two minutes without any equipment other than their rubber suits, masks and nets. The Korean women divers of Jeju Island have faced the tempestuous tides of history and struggle for economic survival. Their intimate relationship to the land and sea, their shaman beliefs, and their communal village life have kept them protected from modern pressures. In return, many of the haenyeo live a life of purpose and resilience well into their 90s. They illuminate a steady, fearless course and most of all, an enduring legacy.

• Heart as Arena on artist Dread Scott's Tuesday performance in front of the NY Stock Exchange, where he burned money: "During the performance, a couple curious traders had come over to see the action. They seemed mildly amused. This was a joke, really. They obviously felt at home. After it was all over they went back inside for the afternoon and ushered the Dow down 148.89 points. Burn." Via Hyperallergic.

• Dubbing them "eyesores," New York's sanitation department says it plans on removing ghost bikes -- memorial bikes painted white and chained to posts near sites where cyclists have been killed by cars -- due to a "handful" of complaints. A public hearing on the topic is scheduled for July 20.

• New York gallery show: The Mass Ornament, curated by Minneapolis' John Rasmussen (Midway Contemporary Art) and including artist Jay Heikes, David Zink Yi, Gebi Sibony and others. June 25–August 13 at Gladstone on W. 24th.

“The University’s president and board have solemnized an alliance with the coal industry, in return for a large monetary ‘gift,’ granting to the benefactors, in effect, a co-sponsorship of the University’s basketball team. That — added to the ‘Top 20’ project and the president’s exclusive ‘focus’ on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — puts an end to my willingness to be associated in any way officially with the University.”

6.22.2010

The way this anti-BP graffitiin Chicago extends from the wall to the ground and forms the outline of the United States reminds me of Huang Yong Ping's sculpture Amerigo Vespucci, which does the same thing. Of the latter work, Huang wrote:

An Italian-bred bulldog, the Neapolitan mastiff (mastino napoletano), is used here as a metaphor for Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian who documented the discovery of the American continent and after whom America was named. This bulldog’s urine forms the geographical outline of America in an instantaneous and accidental way. Here the line between the wall and the ground represents the world’s longest straight border (the United States–Canada border). Its fluidity implies extensiveness and overflowingness. It is an example of all “limits” and “borders.”

6.14.2010

A 10-meter magnolia tree is planted in the center of Chile’s National Stadium where dictator Pinochet in 1973 imprisoned thousands of political prisoners who were tortured and killed. After planting the tree, the stadium doors are open to the public as a park; offering a space to stop, look again, and remember. An impossible, cathartic soccer match played before 20.000 people, closes the project after a week of activity.

• While Paddy Johnson gives props to a portrait done by Minneapolis' Miles Mendenhall on last week's episode of Work of Art, artist Ross Bleckner tweaks auctioneer Simon de Pury's comment that "in a split second I can tell whether a work of art is great or not." He cites the late Louise Bourgeois, who slogged nearly unrecognized in the arts until she was in her 60s: "De Pury should remember that some things happen slowly, and not all artists—or their work—can be recognized as 'great' or 'genius' in a split second. Art is about slowing down time, and thinking—neither of which television does very well." And: Jerry Saltz completes the circle of mediation.

These stencils -- which read "Soldiers aren't cookies" in Hebrew -- have been spotted in Jerusalem: Flickr user Mekron says he found the one above in central Jerusalem, while this one has a more specific ID of Hillel Street. Mekron didn't have more context for the work or who's behind them, but only says it's an antiwar stencil.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of the message. One Flickr user translates the text as "War isn't cookies." That is, it's not a cake walk, a piece of cake, easy as pie. But the more direct read is that, like cookies chewed up and spat out by a hasty ravenous monster, soldiers are victims of war, too. In spite of the fact that, as an institution, the IDF is one of the world's best-funded, most sophisticated fighting forces, the individual soldiers are, well, fragile. The sentiment brings to mind a speech by Haruki Murakami I often quote here. He used an egg and and a wall in a metaphor for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. One way to read the metaphor, he says, is that unarmed civilians are the eggs, while tanks, guns and white phosphorus shells are the wall. But he also offers a more nuanced interpretation:

Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others - coldly, efficiently, systematically.

6.09.2010

Works from Murad Khan Mumtaz's "Torn with fire" series, reproduced with permission from the artist

In Pakistani artist Murad Khan Mumtaz's series "Torn with fire," ghosts appear to materialize on the faces of U.S. dollars, bomb clouds expand to engulf the currency's face, and expanses of black or white blur out the intricate details of the bills. But while such imagery -- and interventions into the top symbol of American capitalism -- is decidedly political, the Lahore-born, Columbia University–educated artist was reluctant at first to make the kind of work he detests: sociopolitical art. In a fascinating two-part interview with ART on AIR's Peter Brock, he tells of how the haunting project came to be.

Long mastering the painstaking art of Persian and Indian miniature painting, he found himself applying tiny dots in a "meditative and almost an escapist exercise" to make "cloud forms." Then his professor, artist Kara Walker, tried to push him out of his comfort zone. "What embarrasses you in art?" he recalls her asking.

"What kept coming up is the sociopolitical," he said. "That's one thing I've been running away from and almost detest."

Through the project, which was on view in the just-closed 2010 Columbia MFA thesis show at the Fisher Landau Center for Art, explored ways to subvert the bills -- and the idea of political art that's so popular in the west -- and "make it more contemplative." His artist's statement says that "through the slow and disciplined application of tiny dots (pardakht) and lines (tipai) Mumtaz transforms the bills into uncanny objects whose ambiguous imagery is at once meditative and foreboding, nostalgic for a lost past and steeped in premonitions of losses yet to come."In doing so, he navigates between modernity and tradition, melding an ancient, delicate artform with a symbol so of-the-moment it's called "currency." He says he was also thinking about instability, in his personal life and in the economy, while working on the series, and his imagery of ghosts, smoke and clouds reference that: they're "almost invisible, neither air nor water, but something in between."

On one hand, he tells Brock you have bills, something "as material as you can get... and yet you have that technique and that image which sorts of transcends that, transcends materiality."

There's another tension as well, between lasting beauty and the crass immediacy of commerce: "Beauty with a capital B being something that is timeless... When you say the word 'dollar bill' it becomes something very sort of base. And yet, the bill itself has been made so beautifully."And this is where he gets even more political. In the exacting process of miniature painting, he came to realize the deeper significance of the dollar bill as medium.

"It started out just making the cloud form and using one's own technique on the bill, then I realized that the dollar bill itself has such a history of its own, and such a weird history which is linked with imperialism, with white supremacy, with a sort of white power. Those things started to seep in unconsciously."

Implicit in that history is war, he adds. Mumtaz says he's influenced by two Lebanese creators, artist Walid Raad and writer/filmmaker Jalal Toufic. Toufic, he says, writes that ghosts are "the aftermath of war, but anyone who has gone through war is, in a way, a ghost or is part of the undead. They have already seen death. And people who carry out war, and people who drop the bomb, for example, that person is also part of the undead."

"That became very fascinating for me, because, you know, the dollar bill itself is a driving force for war, for imperialism. And that connects back to the notion of the ghosts appearing out of the dollar."

• The LA Times' Christopher Knight eviscerates Sarah Jessica Parker's new show "Work of Art," which debuts on Bravo tonight, as "vacant television piddle." (It features Minneapolis artist Miles Mendenhall.)

• Chris Jordan's E. Pluribus Unum (2010), a 21-square-foot laser etching on aluminum that "depicts the names of one million organizations around the world that are devoted to peace, environmental stewardship, social justice, and the preservation of diverse and indigenous culture." Via Provisions Library.

6.08.2010

6.04.2010

• Designer Emmet Byrne blogs on former Bogota mayor Antanus Mockus, whose governing style was creative, open and poetic. Said Mockus, who was defeated in his re-election bid last week: “While I was the mayor of Bogotá, I received occasional death threats. Therefore, I had to use a bullet-proof vest. I made a hole right where my heart is. The hole was in the shape of a heart. I believe this kind of gesture, gave me indeed more protection.”

• While artist Marina Abramovic told the Wall Street Journal she was "completely destroyed" by her just-completed 736-hour epic endurance/performance art work, she tells MOMA's PS1 blog what she learned about her body in the process: "I learned that in your body you have so much space and you can actually move inside that. There is space between organs, there is space between bones, there is space between atom and cell, so you can actually start training yourself to breathe a kind of air into that space. And then I understood that the pain is actually not having space, it’s when organs and everything press inside, so by breathing air you can make the pain just disappear."

• Half Letter Press' publication of a limited edition booklet on the late Minnesota-based conceptual artist Don Celender reminded me of his various projects, from baseball cards featuring artists to his dying request -- that, at his memorial service, friends read from his book Mortal Remains, in which he asked 400 artists and writers what they want done with their remains after passing away. A sample: New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast said she wanted her body compacted into the shape and volume of a bouillon cube (if you have trouble with the how-to part, check with the military, she suggests) then buried in the ground beneath a small tombstone marked with a Minnesota-appropriate epitaph, “Don’t mind me.”

• In case you haven't heard such a thing today, the sound of a toilet flushing: Yoko Ono on Ubuweb.

I asked Teddy to "Star Wars Kid" it for me. Just as the original footage of a kid caught on video goofing around with a broomstick was altered by countlessanonymousanimators by added light sabers effects, Teddy has inserted a light saber into Smithson's hand.

• A Detroit gallery that removed a site-specific Banksy work, possibly without permission, is getting threats. Bad at Sports reports that the piece, stenciled on a cinderblock wall at the former Packard plant, has "now been removed from display after the gallery & work had been reportedly threatened with defacement or destruction (I would imagine the gallery more then the work)."

• One of Todd Lamb's Notes from Chris, left on a public wall: "MEET ME AT THIS SUBWAY STOP TOMORROW AT 4PM IF YOU WANT A QUEEN SIZED MATTRESS. WE'LL GO TO MY MOM'S HOUSE AND GET IT. IT'S BRAND NEW. EXCEPT FOR SOME CAT HAIR. BRING A COUPLE OF BUCKS FOR SOME GATORADES OR SNAPPLES OR SOME FRITOS. -- CHRIS"

• Minneapolis exhibition: We Work Here, "an exhibition about art, economics, and community," opens June 5 at Intermedia Arts.

• Call for workshop proposals: As part of Futurefarmers' Minneapolis residency, the Walker's looking for artists/hackers/tinkerers to create a two-day workshop around the notion of "voice box." Deadline: June 25. And, oh yeah, the Walker's Open Field launches tonight.

Paul Schmelzer is web editor at the Walker Art Center, creator of Signifier, signed, a former editor at Adbusters and contributor to Artforum.com, Cabinet, Raw Vision, The Progressive, Utne and others.More >>